Book burning is an expression of destroying ideas that were built on a previous generation, which is considered outdated and opposed to the ideas of the new generation. Quite frankly, it is an easier action than educating the current generation.
Education, however, cannot be replaced by anything else because its goal is to bring about inner change in people. Everything other than education is something external. Expressing hatred toward certain writers and books is a departure from correct education.
Past writers wrote what they did in a way considered correct for their time. In general, each generation destroys what the previous generation built, but there is a correct way to destroy something in order to correctly build anew.
The correct form of education is when people are taught to love one another. By reaching a common love among everyone, we remove the basis of inequality. Book burning, however, lets hatred proliferate among all strata of the population.
We need an approach where we accept the occurrence of whatever happened in the past, and we should not burn anything or break any monuments. In other words, we should not recall the bad. Instead, from the present moment onward, we should adjust our attitudes to each other—to try and love one another. We would then have no need to destroy anything that came beforehand.
We would then also understand that whatever happened had to have happened the way that it did. We were all young, we soiled our diapers. That is how we grew up. We did silly things, smashed and broke dishes, or whatever else. We all went through such paths of growth.
We undergo natural stages of maturation, and we should not forget about what has happened. Moreover, we have nothing to be ashamed of nor to justify in our past. We just have to understand why nature made us the egoistic beings that we are, and that we have a massive ego still dwelling in us. We should then focus on what we need to do in order to correct our current ego.
The human ego is a desire to benefit at the expense of others and nature. It enslaves each and every one of us within ourselves. If we set ourselves on a path to break free from our enslavement to the ego, we would then become grateful for the pages of history, because they led to our current heightened awareness and the decision to realize our true freedom and independence.
We need to learn how to control the ego dwelling within us correctly. If we destroy it, then we correct nothing, and simply keep ourselves suspended in the air.
Based on the video “Why Do People Burn Books?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Semion Vinokur. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Photo by Brendan Stephens on Unsplash.
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